[lyttlerock]

The key word here seems to be "up to". It'll be interesting to see how many employees (common shareholders) are actually willing to sell their shares to the investors.

If they're holding on and the full $525M isn't raised, then almost paradoxically, I'd wager that Unity is doing really really well. If they're selling, I don't think it necessarily can be construed as good or bad without proper context.

[dmix]

> If they're selling, I don't think it necessarily can be construed as good or bad without proper context.

This is assuming the employees and stock holders are rational and can maintain long-term risky assets. Plenty of people will be looking to cash out as they've held stock for a long period and want to buy a nice house or car or something.

I'm sure the wealthier percentage will take a longer term look at it. But I wouldn't generalize the average equity owning employee as you would a typical public market.

[mtremsal]

Selling shares during a tender offer is a perfectly rational move for employees that are cash-poor and faced with the tax implications of exercising their options. Also obviously for anyone looking to simply de-risk.

[dmix]

Fair enough, it’s all about how much time and money you have. Rational was a poor choice of words.

[mcmoose75]

I was at a company previously that had a liquidity event, and many of my colleagues (not me unfortunately) had very meaningful stock awards.

A lot of people discussed what they should do openly, and recognized the potential for the stock to go up later on- many defaulted to selling half of their holdings as soon as they could to put some cash in their pocket, and holding on to half for potential gains. Not super sophisticated, but it seemed like it made good sense to me.

[SeanBoocock]

It will be interesting to see how the next couple years play out. The growth opportunities in my mind are: expanding their suite of hosted services (https://unity3d.com/services); and convincing an increased percentage of large publishers/developers to develop on Unity. While there is a business in building tools for (generally smaller) developers, it is hard to imagine a $6 billion valuation on the back of just developer subscriptions, even the significantly more expensive enterprise arrangements.

Services represent an opportunity to scale based on the success of products built on Unity, not just on the size of the developer community.

[daemin]

They could also be using that money in order to combat Epic and Unreal, especially given that Epic has a lot of money from Fortnite and their owners Tencent.

Because out of the engines that any game studio can use for a new project, there's really only Unity and Unreal.*

* = If they do not have their own internal engine or it is not applicable to their new game.

[zimpenfish]

> there's really only Unity and Unreal.

Is CRYENGINE no longer an option?

https://www.cryengine.com/

[daemin]

There's Lumberyard which you could say is a fork of CryEngine. But in general I don't see studios lining up to use either of the two.

Also the idTech engine is limited to games that are published by Bethesda. So you can count it as an in-house engine now, just like Frostbite is for EA.

[georgeecollins]

Lumberyard really doesn't have the support that Unity and Unreal have. It is hard to recommend using Lumberyard when there are alternatives that are well tested, well documented, and many developers are familiar with.

[jtms]

It doesn’t get used very often these days to my knowledge

[golergka]

Keep in mind, that with this kind of sell deal, employees and investors have drastically different risk sensitivity. For employees cashing in their stock options or getting stock, it could be up to a half of their middle-class compensation – not the kind of money a rational person would put into risiker investments. But funds that invest in startups are specializing in high risk/reward, which their customers – other financial institutions who put a minor portion of managed money in such ventures, or individuals who are significantly wealthier than middle class and can afford to lose a lot of money without damage to their livelihood and lifestyle.

So, my point is, these kinds of deals are very often win-win, and can't signify that there's something wrong with the company.

[gvb]

They should follow Marc Cuban's example; take some money out of their share holding and diversify their investments.

Quoting from https://www.fool.com/slideshow/7-things-you-can-learn-mark-c...

5. Diversification is extremely important

It’s important to maintain a diverse investment portfolio, whether you’ve just come into billions of dollars as Mark Cuban did in 1999 or you’re starting with a few hundred dollars.

When Cuban and his partners sold Broadcast.com in 1999, they didn’t get billions in cash -- it was all in the form of Yahoo stock. Instead of holding virtually all of his wealth in one company’s stock, he did a great job of diversifying his investments. Cuban spent $20 million hedging his Yahoo stock with synthetic indexes, and shortly thereafter acquired assets such as the Dallas Mavericks and Landmark Theatres.

It’s a good thing Cuban did all of that. Yahoo’s stock price dropped by more than 96% from January 2000 through September 2011. To put this in perspective, $1 billion in Yahoo stock would have fallen in value to just over $34 million.

[trimbo]

> Cuban spent $20 million hedging his Yahoo stock with synthetic indexes

My understanding is that he used puts.

Either way, any derivative strategies he employed back then almost certainly violates any corporate stock agreement today.

[gvb]

The point isn't how Cuban hedged his stock holdings, it is that he hedged them and that he would have lost a huge amount of money if he had not. Applying this to the Unity shareholders, their smart move is to sell some of their Unity stock holdings and use the cash from those sales to diversify their portfolio.

[madeofpalk]

> If they're selling, I don't think it necessarily can be construed as good or bad without proper context.

Maybe they just want to be rich, now? Of course depending on how much I would get, but my decision to sell would have very little to do with how well I thought the company was going.

[harperlee]

Yes. I read some study that stated that, contrary to popular belief, stock selling by insiders is not very informative (due to noise from liquidity needs that stem from personal finance) - whereas stock purchasing is quite so. If someone aggresively moves to buy something (s)he deeply knows, there is something to it.